Exactly what will it take for brands to embrace the new reality of search?

It has been a few months since Interflora's recovery from the
landmark Google penalty caused almost certainly by a large number
of paid advertorials and potentially by a number of other link
building techniques. Interflora had suffered a milder penalty in
2012 from which it had recovered, but then continued to link build
against Google's guidelines thus incurring a rarely seen level of
wrath from the web spam team that saw Interflora lose rankings not
only for all of its generic and long tail queries but also the
brand - an almost unheard of level of severity for a link based
penalty. It seems an opportune time to put down some of my thoughts
on the "state of link building", current and future.

Linking without linking

As Social Media becomes the de facto way of expressing
appreciation for a piece of content, naturally given links are
becoming vanishingly rare. Frankly, why would you bother when you
can press a "share" or "like" button and be done with it?

Meanwhile there is a flight of SEO's to the few remaining link
building "techniques" that are collectively deemed "safe", however
misinformed they may be.

Various forms of semantic markup that allow content to reference
its source without an explicit link may also prove important in the
future. Google's proprietary authorship markup is widely hyped but
is just one example of a burgeoning pool of schema and
microformatting options for content providers.

Make no mistake: search engines will have to use these
"non-link" link signals more in the future. After all, they are
companies that have historically leant on links as a signal, but
are now faced with a shrinking pool of those links, a greater and
greater percentage of which are manipulated (if you think about it
for long enough you almost start to feel sorry for them).

Mixed messages from Google

For marketers, things are getting confused by Google's apparent
mixed messages on various types of link, caused by its increasingly
prominent television advertising for the Chrome browser and the
connected "ecosystem" of Google services. In a classic case of the
left hand not talking to the right, paid advertorials, sponsored
posts and product reviews have all received apparent endorsements
by Google on the one hand while various penalties, warnings and
guidelines tell a completely different story.

Take product reviews. The basic approach here is to identify a
number of bloggers in your industry with a desirable following and
send them free products to review. From there angles vary, from the
obviously unnatural "in return for me sending you this I expect a
link to this page with this anchor text" to "here's a product, do
what you will". The former line is explicitly named and shamed in
Google's webmaster guidelines, and the shades of grey in the middle
have various degrees of risk. A highly trumped campaign by
Interflora resulted in many product review style blog posts, many
of which had links to Interflora that might have been deemed
unnatural (note that nobody except Google, including probably
Interflora itself, knows exactly which links if any contributed to
its penalty aside from the paid advertorials that are about as open
and shut a case as it's possible to get).

Meanwhile, the current Google Chrome above the line campaign you
may have seen on TV recently (http://youtu.be/E0qDrRJT4zE)
features the story of Cambridge Satchels, a startup company that
sends products to fashion bloggers as part of its online marketing
strategy. In the ad this results in YouTube video reviews, but
Google certainly runs the risk of being seen to explicitly sanction
sending products to bloggers in return for promotion, including by
extension links. In reality of course, Chrome's marketing team just
isn't talking to Matt Cutts and his web spam team, proof of which
came when a paid advertorial and a number of sponsored blog posts
for Chrome went live on the day that Interflora was banned
including followable links to various Google pages. At the time of
writing, Google seems to have removed the specific posts that were
widely reported on but others still remain, including its links
(search for "this blog is part of a series sponsored by
Chromebooks" in quotes to unearth some). This hypocrisy is bound to
raise ire and confusion in equal measure.

Penguin 2.0

In March Matt Cutts told us to expect a "very large" Penguin
update at some point this year. Penguin is the closest thing to an
algorithmic version of a member of the web spam team, dishing out
ranking "filters" that feel like link penalties, thus far to a very
small number of sites (to date Penguin updates have typically
affected less than 0.5% of search results). The Penguin update we
have seen is arguably not that large - yet - but I think it is now
quite obvious (despite Chrome's best efforts!) that in general
Google expects marketers to be going cold turkey on link "building"
and doing things properly. At the moment this has resulted in a lot
of noise about content marketing.

Unfortunately I am not convinced that many people really get
what this means. I recently attended a content strategy conference
full of people whose jobs revolved purely around content. The thing
that struck me most clearly was that the concept of assigning value
to content was seen as weirdly alien. In particular, in a session
dedicated exactly to this topic, the speaker had to explain what
ROI meant and felt the need to speak to the delegates like a room
of primary school pupils. For someone coming from an online
marketing background it was faintly condescending and frankly
bizarre.

I have written often of the need to blend the various strands of
on- and off-line marketing into compelling campaigns and I'm more
convinced than ever now that success will come from mashing
creativity together with the science of numbers driven marketing -
call it content marketing if you like. Perhaps the Interflora case
and the continued threat of Penguin will turn out to be the tipping
point that convinces brands to embrace the new reality we find
ourselves in.